News

New version of the Roadmap of Web Applications on Mobile

W3C has published a new version of its Roadmap of Web Applications on Mobile, an overview of the various technologies developed in W3C that increase the capabilities of Web applications, and how they apply more specifically to the mobile context.

The contents of the roadmap have been updated to follow the evolution of the Web platform since April 2018. See the Change history for details. Most of these updates focused on mechanisms that allow mobile web applications to tweak performance settings and gain finer-grained control over the browser’s default behavior. In particular, new exploratory work and technologies in progress mentioned in the Performance and Tuning page include:

the CSS Animation Worklet API to create scripted animations in a dedicated thread,

the CSS contain property to indicate that an element’s subtree is independent of the rest of the page,

the proposed CSS overscroll-behavior property to control the behavior of a scroll container when its scrollport reaches the boundary of its scroll box,

the Event Timing Web Perf API to measure the latency of events triggered by user interaction,

the Identifiers for WebRTC’s Statistics API to monitor the performance of the network and media pipeline in peer-to-peer scenarios, and

Priority Hints to let developers signal the priority of each resource they need to download.

The roadmap did not mention WebDriver, recently published as a W3C Recommendation, a key technology for mobile web developers as it enables automated testing across browsers and devices. This was an oversight, fixed in this new version.

The implementation info rendered in tables now also embeds information from the MDN Browser Compatibility Data project. A new “partial” badge also indicates that an implementation may be incomplete, either because it is, or because implementation data is not complete enough to assess support of the entire specification.

Sponsored by Beihang University, this project is part of a set of roadmaps under development in a GitHub repository to document existing standards, highlight ongoing standardization efforts, point out topics under incubation, and discuss technical gaps that may need to be addressed in the future. New versions will be published on a quarterly basis, or as needed depending on progress of key technologies of the Web platform. We encourage the community to review them and raise comments, or suggest new ones, in the repository’s issue tracker.

W3C Staff Judy Brewer is the 2018 ACM SIGACCESS Award honoree

The SIGACCESS Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computing and Accessibility recognizes individuals who have made significant and lasting contributions to the development of computing technologies that improve the accessibility of media and services to people with disabilities. This award recognizes members of the community for long-term accomplishments or those who have made a notable impact through a significant innovation.

Judy Brewer is Director of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and a Principal Research Scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. For the past 21 years, under Judy’s leadership, WAI has developed key accessibility standards, prominent amongst which are the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG), User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG), and Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA).

As part of the award, Judy has been invited to present a keynote talk at the ASSETS Conference on October 22nd. Read more about about the SIGACCESS Award, about WCAG and WAI.

The CSS Working Group has published a Proposed Recommendation of CSS Fonts Module Level 3. This CSS3 module describes how font properties are specified and how font resources are loaded dynamically. The contents of this specification are a consolidation of content previously divided into CSS3 Fonts and CSS3 Web Fonts modules. The description of font load events was moved into the CSS Font Loading module.

Comments are welcome through 11 September 2018.

W3C Invites Implementations of CSS Scroll Snap Module Level 1 and CSS Values and Units Module Level 3; Level 4 is a First Public Working Draft

The CSS Scroll Snap Module contains features to control panning and scrolling behavior with “snap positions”. The CSS module, defined in the CSS Values and Units Module Level 3 and Level 4, describes the common values and units that CSS properties accept and the syntax used for describing them in CSS property definitions. See changes in Level 3 and Level 4.

CSS is a language for describing the rendering of structured documents (such as HTML and XML) on screen, on paper, in speech, etc.

The Timed Text Markup Language is a content type that represents timed text media for the purpose of interchange among authoring systems. Timed text is textual information that is intrinsically or extrinsically associated with timing information.

It is intended to be used for the purpose of transcoding or exchanging timed text information among legacy distribution content formats presently in use for subtitling and captioning functions.

In addition to being used for interchange among legacy distribution content
formats, TTML Content may be used directly as a distribution format, for example, providing a standard content format to reference from a <track>
element in an [HTML 5.2] document, or a <text> or
<textstream> media element in a [SMIL 3.0] document.

The Web Authentication Working Group invites implementations of an updated Candidate Recommendation of Web Authentication: An API for accessing Public Key Credentials Level 1. This specification defines an API enabling the creation and use of strong, attested, scoped, public key-based credentials by web applications, for the purpose of strongly authenticating users. Conceptually, one or more public key credentials, each scoped to a given WebAuthn Relying Party, are created and stored on an authenticator by the user agent in conjunction with the web application. The user agent mediates access to public key credentials in order to preserve user privacy. Authenticators are responsible for ensuring that no operation is performed without user consent. Authenticators provide cryptographic proof of their properties to Relying Parties via attestation. This specification also describes the functional model for WebAuthn conformant authenticators, including their signature and attestation functionality.

Upcoming W3C Workshop on Permissions and User Consent

The primary goal of the workshop is to bring together security and privacy experts, UI/UX researchers, browser vendors, mobile OS developers, API authors, Web publishers and users to address the privacy, security and usability challenges presented by a complex and overlapping variety of permissions and consent systems available for hardware sensors, device capabilities and applications on the Web.

With 13+ million registered customers and an extensive product portfolio, Deutsche Telekom is a major player in the European Internet market, and is also an active participant in W3C activities. Deutsche Telekom's Internet Media Technology - using open standards - allows for flexibility and speed in adapting new technologies.